Live Panel: How to Capture Moments: Realism to Abstraction

Acrylic | Watercolor | Mixed Media

Teaching is my life, paired with painting and moving through the world creatively. Working with other painters to help them identify, refine, and express their version of beautifully different or compelling is one the passions I hold most dear. As a self-taught artist of 18 years, I came about this journey of art through unique circumstances and found that it held great potential for helping me learn to connect and express how I feel about my human experiences through the incredible combination of paint, pigment, and paper.

When I knew I needed a style I didn’t have an academic program, professor, or mentor to help me understand how to develop that, so I turned inward and committed a year to studying and defining what gives an artist their ‘style.’ That was the most important year of my life professionally because it equipped me with understanding the head space, skills, and heart connection that every artist needs to curate their own visual language and use it to express a narrative of their choice.

Click Here to learn more about Ardith

Oil | Charcoal | Drawing

I collect moments. If you look through my collection you’ll see paintings of people I’ve met, places I’ve been, and things I’ve seen. Because of my background in classical realism, it is important for me to paint these moments realistically. But solely painting realism feels incomplete, and I find that it can become a bit too academic. It’s not only about the visual recreation that is my intention in oil painting. I want to make my audience feel they are walking down a rainy street, climbing up a sun drenched hill, or sitting in front of a beautiful figure.

I want a viewer to feel the moments I collect.

In my work, I find myself breaking free from traditional ways of painting and incorporating much more expressive means. I place highly developed detail next to looser, almost abstract, areas. I’m fascinated with how to combine near photographic rendering alongside the roughness of the palette knife, or the randomness of a loaded brush. This combination of realism and Impressionism techniques creates a natural tension in my paintings, as well as directs where I want the eye to travel. Even my choice of composition and subject matter are influenced by this part of me. I find that I create compositions outside of conventional rules and gravitate towards subjects that do not necessarily follow a standard of beauty. There is a bit of provocation in this, as I play off of the traditional ways art should be, but there is also an invitation to see what else beauty entails.

Click Here to learn more about Calvin